Actually the genre was never as dead as people want to make you believe. There have always been 3D platformers but not quite like the famous Nintendo 64 era.

Anyway, Yooka-Laylee made quite some news the last month before its release. Not the good kind of news. If you didn't follow the drama, which is very likely, Jontron, a popular Youtuber, made quite the headline when he shared on an interview some insight on his thoughts on immigration politics. I don't go into detail with this for obvious reasons but he made pretty much clear, he is not a fan of immigrants.Funny though that he is one or at least a descendant of one himself. Ouch!What you also probably didn't know, he was invited as guest voice cast for Yooka-Laylee. I don't know what character he exaczly spoke but it was a side character, simply a guest role, nothing more. Now you have to understand, Yooka-Laylee does not have real voice lines but instead people just imitate sounds with their voice, something that Banjo Kazooie did ages ago.So he never had a fully voice line to begin with, all he did was blabbling in the mic. Not really soemthing you could distinguish from different people. However, with his recent views exposed by the media, the developers of Yooka-Laylee distanced themself from him and said they remove his voice lines from the game. Which Jontron said himself he can understand. it was okay for him. Now, I'm not really a fan of him or his voice, so I couldn't care less about him being removed.However, his thousands of fans do care about this. They pretty much started a shitstorm on Playtronic (the developers) because of this and accused them of being racist (because of Jontrons ethnic background) and demanded refunds for their kickstarter pledges. Which... kind of was the most stupid thing I heard in a while. When they pledged on Kickstarterm they signed a liability. Playtronic has no reason to refund them, especially since they didn't took anything away fromt he product, it's still the same game less some voice lines. Which were never a feature of the game anyway, they were simply a guest character.Because the fans didn't get their money back, they flamed the developers and spammed the official forums.

Eventually some of the community managers snapped ans snarked back at the crybabys (at this point you have to call them that way) hich fueled the flames even more of course. In the end both sides did pretty stupid stuff while the developers had to deal with a mess just because of one simple decision.

Game gets released, this wasn't of course the end of the show. Since they didn't get refunds, they still ahd the game. And because they had th egame, they had access to the review system fo Steam and created another shitstorm there, where they told people how aweful the game is and what a waste of money it is. Most stuff was simply copied from each other or from some official reviewers that didn't put a good light on the game, namely Jimquisition/Jim Sterling (seriously, this dude can go to hell anyway but that's just my opinion and has nothing to do with his review on this perticular game) who gave the game a 2/10 and said the most horrible things about it. at least in his case you cannot say he is a Jontron Fanboy. I don't think he is a fan of anything but himself anyway.

Now, let's get straight to the game itself. I bought it, I played it.I didn't care for the Steam reviews, but I dreaded it because some serious game critics rated the game poorly. I... kind of was disappointed with the result? Not with the game but that the critics didn't care at all for the game itself.The main goal of the game was to recreate a classic 3D platformer of the old times. Stuff like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, etc. And they nailed it. Maybe they nailed it too good. I like to divide this stuff in "nostalgia" and "overstatement". Nostalgia simply is the feeling or the appeal of the old games. Yooka Laylee is exactly a 1 to 1 copy of that. It's not a reimaging, it is a copy. well, of course the levels, characters and all this stuff is new but the gameplay and the features are directly taken from Banjo-Kazooie (you have to know, Playtronic is composed of people that worked on Banjo-Kazooie in the past). Because of this, they did a good job. If you want another Banjo-Kazooie, you get one.The other part is overstatement. This is, when they did too much of the old stuff because of the sake of "Nostalgia". Develpers, that recreate old games, want to bait players with the nostalgic feeling but sometimes they overdo it and suddenly you have not only the good but also the bad. This is the case with Yooka-Laylee. While some say they ONLY copied the bad stuff, this is not true. The game itself is excellent and tons of fun (if you like the genre). However, ignoring the mistakes made wouldn't do the game justice either. We have to be fair on both ends and the game does a lot of wrong just because they wanted to make it nostalgic.

I don't want to mention the camera because a lot of people bash on this and honestly, making the camera behave perfect on all occassions is really hard in these games because you see the game from every single angle possible. I don't have that much problems with the cmarea anyway but it seems that other people do. Maybe they simply played too much third person shooters, where you have one camera angle the entire game.

A good example of "overdoing it" are the voices. Liek I said before, BK did it, so they wanted to do it here too. But the chattering voices are most often annoying as hell, only a few voices are done right. Trowzers sounds really good, the protagonist, the characters you hear the most often in the game, sound terrible. The most annoying character voice so far is Dr Quack and he is the first one you hear in the game. He is a duck (of course) and they tried to imitate a duck with their voice but the whole thing sounds like a fat guy that ran too much and is out of his breath (it really sounds like this, this isn't exaggerating).

Minigames are another good examle. Of course this game has tons of them, after all there are 145 main onjectives to collect and these have to be filled with tasks. Most minigames are well designed but some are really really really terrible. An example? The race against Nimble the cloud. You have to use the sprint move which drains energy, in order to regain energy, you ahve to collect butterflys. Problem is, the whole race does not leave much room for mistakes, if you even skip one butterfly, you might run out of energy and nimble will outrun you with no chance to catch up, even if you do perfectly after. I had to do the race multiple times and it was one of the FIRST tasks in the game. Another example is the shooting gallery in world 1. This thing goes the exact opposite way than the cloud race. Instead of incredibly hard, it's too easy. Eactually, you cannot screw up at all, because there is no timer, no limited ammo, you can try to shoot at the targets as often as possible and if you aren't drunk, you will eventually hit all of them. The minigame has in my opinion no purpose but to take some time from the player. Ouch.Spoiler alert, this is about the first boss:

Spoiler for Hidden:

The first boss figth is no boss figth at all, even if it is labeled as one. It is a dodgign minigame where you have to dodge rolling tree logs and reach the "boss", hit him once, rinse and repeat. You could argue if this is a boss fight but it felt more like a minigame. An awefully designed one as well because, again, there was no room for mistakes.

The tasks are either incredibly hard or stupidly easy. there is barely something inbetween. Another example of overdoing it, they wanted hard tasks but they kind of ruined the difficulty graph here. Normally a game is easy at the start and progresses to get harder the longer it goes with some spikes inbetween to keep the player on his watch. This game is spikes all over.

Okay, anoth rambling, honestly, the game is good. Liek, really good, I had much fun with it. And I just reached world 2 (of 5). One of the new features they did for this game is that you can "expand" worlds by using the main collectibles of the game as currency. This way old worlds add new segments to them with new stuff to doscover, new objectives etc. That way you can come back later to worlds, expand them and look for new stuff instead of seeing something and wondering how to get there.Another thing I liked is the "berry" system. At some point Yooka learns to how to eat special berries which give him super powers depending ont he berry. This allows him to solve soem of the puzzles in the game, some berries can be shot as ammunition, some let him breath fire or spit water and I recently dscivered one that lets him throw bombs. It's an interesting feature, nothing new in the genre but it still is fun.The graphics look very well, the worlds are detailed designed, the characters look goofy liek they should be and in general the game looks great, even on the lowest setting.The game might not run smooth on any computer, at first it ran really awful on mine until I deactivated V-Sync and suddenly I had no lag at all. If you bought the game and it does not run well, deactivate V-Sync, this might help.

The game has with 145 main collectibles and over 1000 side collectibles a lot to do, at least for completionist. People that simply want to finish the game might run through in a very short time because the target goals aren't set very high.

As a last note, the game costs with 50$ a lot of money, something might not be worth for everyone. If you truly are a fan of BK and similiar games and a completionist, than this game is worth the money. If you just want the game for a playthrough and not for every single bit, the game costs too much. The main storyline is too short and too quickly experienced in my opinion.

On one hand: I've always loved platformers. I've always loved 3D platformers. But right now, Nintendo is the only one making the things (well, the 3D ones anyway). I'd love to support the genre in hopes that it might come back. I'm so tired of gritty shooters and "mature" games.

On the other hand: I've not heard much positive about this. I did see Jim Sterling's review (one of the only reviewers I follow, and frankly this fact shouldn't be surprising), but I've heard sooooooo much about the game from many places now (researched it a bit). Just... it really does seem like it has a lot of problems. A near total lack of difficulty is a big one for me... I know I have a somewhat warped idea about difficulty but I like these games to at least have SOME, in an overall sense (as in, not just specific irritating moments). I remember that BK had this problem at times too (dealing with enemies in particular). Among other issues like the camera, or what frankly seems like just not enough content for this type of game. I mean, 5 worlds? Extendable or not, that... seems low. And for the game type that this is, even 1000 collectibles doesn't seem enough (consider how many DK64 had). I dunno. I kinda expected more content here.

Just... ugh. I wish more devs were doing this sort of game. Yeah there's a bazillion side-scrolling platformers out there, but it's not quite the same really.

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On the Johntron front: I really don't get why people have taken his side. It literally makes no sense to me.

Fanboys, simple as that. The guy has quite the following, and well, you know how rabid people can get. Particularly those that come from the festering hole in the ground that is YouTube. I've always found the guy annoying, really. Always seems to be trying WAY too hard to be funny.

On the Johntron front: I really don't get why people have taken his side. It literally makes no sense to me.

On the game, I haven't had time to play it yet.

He is popular. That's all. You can do really crazy things and get away with them, if you are popular by your fans. That doesn't mean that everyone that isn't your fan will not shit on you because of what you did, but you can be sure that your fans will take your side and defend you, even if you don't care.

About DK64, a lot of people consider that game "less good" because it had "tooo many collectibles". That's what I mean with overdoing it. DK64 in itself was a really well designed game but it had too much. And you simply have to acknowledge it. I saw an analyzing video about DK64 and after I removed my Nostalgia Goggles I realized, that person was right. DK64 had too much and the backtracking was awful. I don't mind if there is less than in DK64 because that game overdid it.Then again, 5 worlds are still not very satisfying. Someone mentioned in the forums that it doesn't matter if you have more collectibles per world, the problem is that less worlds mean less diversity. he is absolutely right, a world has always a theme to it, be it a forest, a water world, a snow world or a desert world, there is always one main theme and you don't mix it with other themes. Banjo-Tooie had this one world where you had a lava and ice theme in one world but the two themes were noticably divided.Having less diversity is not good in a game, players quickly get bored by seeing the same stuff over and over, no matter how much you still can do there.The world themself offer around twice the collectibles than Banjo-Kazooie had to that time but it also means you have to spend twice the amoun of time at the same setting which gets dull at some point. Bigger worlds mean also that backtracking for the last collectibles gets harder because you have to traverse the entire giant world. With 1000 collectibles this is insane to search every nook and cranny.I rather had 10 smaller worlds with half the content per world than 5 giant worlds. I understand however, that this is easier to design for them because you have to design less assets and characters that way. However, fort a 40$ game you could ask for more worlds. A Hat in Time,w hich will also come out later this year, has the same problem, only 5 worlds to explore, way too few to really enjoy the game. What I liked about this game was the many different themes you had. Hell, Super Mario 64 had TONS of worlds and even if some of the themes repeated themself (water worlds, hill worlds, lava worlds), overall it was a variant game with lot of diversity. Many of the worlds weren't even that big to begin with but they were a lot of fun to play.

Still, as it stands, Yooka Laylee is a good game but I dread when it comes to collect everything. And as a completionist I will go down this path but because of the size of the worlds it will become a tough route.

To be honest, I looked at gameplay and nearly instantly switched away, the dialog would drive me utterly insane because unlike Midna in Zelda - Twilight Princess that uses a weird voice form that sounds very melodic they really used GRUNTS in Yooka which sounds extremely annoying after about 10 seconds, while funny the first time, I can't imagine playing the entire game with that, and those mini-games are not something I'd call a well thought idea either, there is a reason the good platformers had ITEM based guidance to new elements, at times very step-by-step hand-holdy, this formula is tried and true, it was perfected 2 decades ago, and this game apparently fails to reproduce that.

I find that for me, the only decent platformers on PC are 2D with heavy focus on combat/items/progression. But even those can be hit and miss

Whenever they go 3D, and not the direction of Nier:Automata, I find them nearly unacceptable to even play.

One of the biggest down points for me, voice overs aside, is the writing itself. It's just not sarcastic and mature enough to even come close to banjo kazooie and banjo tooie from what I read, and there you really have to ask yourself what they were aiming for here, a children game?

Not as easy as you think, and probably indicative why they used grunts, to use the Zelda level of gibberish you really need a matching voice for a character first that you THEN scramble into gibberish, not doing this step usually always produces horrible grunt language that reminds you more of cat-plays-a-keyboard than anything else.

« Last Edit: April 14, 2017, 10:23:38 PM by eRe4s3r »

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I find that actually an interesting topic, because as far as gibberish languages go, we really don't have a lot of bad examples when you think about it, Sims 1 was doing it, and they invented a flat out new language! Then you have the Zelda games which uses normal voice overs + heaviest editing and distortion but retaining harmonics (important) and they absolutely nailed that with Midna and Phi, phy.. or whatever-the-name-was..... to me that is one of the big reasons Zelda: Twilight Princess reigns supreme above all Zelda games. The game oozed atmosphere, because obviously Midna being around all the time created a situation where if you got this wrong it may have damaged the entire game. And Zelda games certainly got it REALLY wrong before, the fairy helper comes to mind.

I can't even think of another game that uses modulated grunts for every syllable. Sure, some games use grunts in a funny way, but only at the start of sentences... or maybe my memory fails me.

And even if you become a cynic and call these helpers with fake language all annoying, in reality Phi and Midna ushered in a level of professionalism that we are sorely lacking nowadays.

Is it unfair to reduce a game to just this? I don't know.. I don't think so actually. If a game has an element that annoys you extremely from the get-go, and that never changes, then you can't honestly expect anyone to retain a neutral stance towards it. Add to that that this seems to have released a few months too early...

Think about it, the ratings on Steam don't even show the real picture, KS backers ratings don't count into the %

And when it all comes down to it, is this a good platformer, or is it just an attempt to cash in on nostalgia...

Ps.: And yeah, Nier: Automata obviously uses voice in a way that no other game has ever done, they use robotic voice as combat effect, fighting a crowd of robots creates an immensely threatening and overwhelming soundscape, I'd even go so far as call that a gameplay element, and not just "fluff" ;p

« Last Edit: April 15, 2017, 09:43:17 AM by eRe4s3r »

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And Zelda games certainly got it REALLY wrong before, the fairy helper comes to mind.

But Octarina of Time is still one of the most successful Zelda games if not even the most successful.

But anyway, I agree on the voices sincerely. Don't get me wrong, some of the voices were done right. But "some" doesn't mean "most of" not even "many". I can think only of a few examples, were the voices fit really well and remind me of BK.

Like eRe4s3r already said, they sound most of the time like grunts. There wasn't put much effort into them which does not surprise me, the voice actors probably didn't even knew what their voice was used in the end, so they just grunted into the mic like they thought it would fit.

Luckily you can skip the sound effect by pressing the A button on the controller (or whatever button you use to forward the dialog), which helps to reduce the annyoing sounds in the game. However, you have to sit through every cutscene and bear the voices because cutscenes cannot be skipped in any way.However, reducing the game only to the voices wouldn't be fair. Since I can skip them for most of the game anyway, I don't mind them as much, even if they are the most terrible aspect of the game.

Liek I said before, the game itself is good. Not overwhelming good, which you would except for a game with this Kickstarter and that price but good enough to fill my hunger for this genre. Are they better or at least as good as BK and the other games from that time? Most certainly not. But then again, these games were top sellers at their time and among the best rated games for N64, it is very hard to improve on that or get even close. Yooka-Layleee is good enough for me (personally) to make it worth playing and I don't actually mind the price so much. It is a little too high for my sense for what you actually get but since I play the game anyway, I don't mind as much as I ramble.Soem challenges and puzzles aren't well designed, true, but there are so many, that this was somehow clear fromt he beginnign. hell, I don't even remember if I liked every single challenge in Banjo-Kazooie but I doubt that.There is for an example a really annoying part in the second world in a cave, where it's dark. You have to eat fireflys to see something. There are many slippery passages and of course there is an abyss everywhere, so one false step and you fall to your death.The problem with that segment is that you have to use the ball ability, which allows you to move on slippery terrain, but controling that thing is really hard. The thing has a too big momentun and stopping it at teh right time is difficult. I eventually gave up after I fall to my demise for the xth time. Good game design? Debatable. BK had similiar segments that were fristrating as well. The reason why Yooka-Laylee however does this wrong (in a sense) is because the momentun of your ability is in general way too high and there is no way to reduce it. There is one section where you are pretty much unable to stop right unless you are lucky. Why? Because you have to take soem steps back for the start, jump over an abyss but the platform behind is too short and you will fall off at the edge of it. Since you have to take the additional steps at the start, you get so much momentun that you are unable to stop yourself from moving in any way. I tried multiple times and I realized, you simply need luck.What makes this the worst part is, it's almost the finish o this chllenge and if you die in any way during your excercise, you have to start all over again. What a pain in the ass. I gave up on that but if you want to get everything you have of course endure it. And don't get me started on the quills that you need. Luckily there aren't many there and they aren't at terribly designed spots but it's still something that brings tears to your eyes.I ahve the feelign they really like to place these things on ramps. A lot.

And that people thought it at least "interesting" shows you by the fact that I can find these videos within 5 seconds. There are a LOT of forum topics about the voices in Okami... ^^

I think the real issue with the voices is that as a unique feature, for 1 character, it can be really effective. But if you overdo it a good thing can quickly become an annoying thing. Midna or Fi don't talk that much that it ever becomes annoying (imo) but in this game here, that's a really baffling creative choice. And hey, Midna also is a really well written character with real development and arcs, so yeah. And the ending... well yeah. THAT I still remember

And yeah @ TheVampire100, I think the biggest problem is that we all remember only things that annoyed us unless we loved the game as a whole, and so nostalgia can make it hard to discern... what you describe sounds not worth 40€ ;p

I am not even sure what this genre even is nowadays when I am honest... I think like real time strategy, RPG's and ARPG's, this stuff needs to evolve, throw old conceptions out and discover new things, and I find new "nostalgia" games usually are the *worst*, I think that should even be a negative tag on Steam "nostalgia game" aka, a game which does nothing better than its betters.

« Last Edit: April 15, 2017, 01:09:39 PM by eRe4s3r »

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I am not even sure what this genre even is nowadays when I am honest... I think like real time strategy, RPG's and ARPG's, this stuff needs to evolve, throw old conceptions out and discover new things, and I find new "nostalgia" games usually are the *worst*, I think that should even be a negative tag on Steam "nostalgia game" aka, a game which does nothing better than its betters.

The problem with that though is that plenty of players just don't like where these evolutions of genres go.

Like RPGs, for example. I used to actually play those, sometimes. Up until about the PS2 era. But since then? You couldn't PAY me to touch one. Someone actually tried, once. I'm pretty sure I hit him with a thing on your foot or something. Far as I'm concerned the genre fell into a pit filled with bees and assorted slimy things and never made it back out. Same with many other genres or series. I know Zelda is a popular one to love, but I've haaaaaaaaaated it ever since Wind Waker (which I consider one of the worst games I've ever played), and didn't like Ocarina much either. The newest one... I'll not even speak of. Let's just say that's a rant that doesn't end well.

Games like this one are created for the sorts of players that never wanted the new changes to begin with. I think a lot of people that go into this don't quite realize just what that means, when it comes to the design here. It's not just that though... part of the problem is that even the developers don't seem to have quite grasped what made BK and similar games great. Doing something like focusing so much on the damn voices... when that has NOTHING to do with the gameplay (and the gameplay, from what I've seen, is a lot of what they get wrong) kinda says to me that they really just didn't quite get it. That it's simply been too long, and they've lost their touch. Yeah, people that played BK remember those voices, but the voices A: weren't the point, and B: weren't even a big part of it. The game didn't do cutscenes either (thankfully) for the most part. It also didn't try to make the worlds too giant and bloated simply so that they could say that the worlds are huge... it gave them the size that they NEEDED to function in the way they were meant to. BK worked in huge part because a ton of effort was put into things like level design. But with this one... it seems that they spread themselves way too thin and hit the wrong areas. It's no surprise that even the nostalgia sorts aren't always liking this one. I mean, the "expanded" worlds idea doesn't even quite make sense. Why not just create more actual worlds? Why is this idea necessary? There's a lot of other elements that I've spotted in footage of the game that I could ramble about, but you get the point.

Games created for "nostalgia" are fine. If the creator actually freaking knows what they are doing. After all, something like BK is still good even if played today. The game has flaws... but it's always had those flaws, they don't just appear magically after a decade or two. In this case, it's not about sticking too close to old trends, it seems like they just missed too many notes as far as design goes. Like they never quite grasped the point of those old trends to begin with. It seems like the game ended up being kinda all over the place, rather than focusing on what really made BK so good.

Games created for Nostalgia have, so far, been a huge disappointment for me though ;( But that is PC only ;p I

I could link quite a few examples, like Pillars of Eternity and Torment 2 ;p I actually replay Torment 1 EE these days so I know what I am talking when I say that the new Torment is inferior in EVERY way (including setting, but at least that was not their choice to begin with, torment license is deadlocked). But it tried to clone Torment with feature checklists, instead of transferring the IDEA of a game exploring how the removal of death can change a human being and affect everyone involved. They created a game with words, yeah Torment 1 has a lot of words, but USUALLY these words are attached to characters that are enjoyable to explore (The whole brothel of intellectual delight is a place where you easily spent 2 real world hours just reading interesting and well written dialog, what an amazing concept.)

And I wholly disagree on the evolution of genres going in a wrong direction, because you are (falsely, imo) assuming that there has been any evolution since the 90ies. We have genre mixes, and more often than not dumbing down of gameplay elements, or refocusing on other parts of a design, but a new genre? We have 2 new genre the recent years, Social games, VR games, and the latter is chaotic and undefined so far, exactly because big studios are not "in it" yet.

I have high hopes for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but rls date is around 2018 o.O They take the time they need, clearly, I just hope at the end comes out a game worthy of that name.

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By "evolution" I don't mean "new genres". I mean the way a given genre has shifted. By that, there definitely has been plenty. Look at FPS games for instance: Used to be stuff like Doom and Wolfenstein; those two are prime examples of how MOST FPS games were. Lots of exploration, lots of weapons, lots of bad guys of all sorts, and tough, wild combat. Fast forward to today: linear gameplay, emphasis on "cover", two weapons at once, that stupid "iron sights" thing... and so on. Or the RPG genre (note that I usually always mean JRPG when I say that, not the sort that appeared on PC). I remember when RPGs used to, you know, put up a fight. And there was LOTS of exploration, and the story was to the freaking point instead of drawn out and rambly. ANd monsters were actually a threat. Now though? I think a particular reviewer's description of FF 13 said it best: "It's a pretty good movie, with an RPG minigame thrown in there for some reason". Even something like the shmup genre has evolved over time (and I could talk for PAGES about that one).

Social games and VR now, yeah, entirely NEW genres (well... sort of), those didn't involve evolution by the definition I'm using here. Though as you couldn't pay me to touch either of them, I wont say too much about them.

Now, as for Kickstarter, well.... stuff like that is why I personally *never* kickstart anything. Other than Arcen's stuff really (as I know the result will be good). If I'm after a game that ISNT done yet? It better be in some playable alpha/beta form, because in that case I can see how it's coming RIGHT BLOODY NOW instead of having to look at vague developer description and such over the course of a freaking year. I can pay them for something I can get at immediately, and in some cases, I end up helping out as well. But with a KS, well... what does anyone expect? You're paying for something that doesn't exist yet. It's like pre-orders: I normally tell people to never, EVER do them. Ever. And stuff like Mighty No. 9 should have taught people a lesson by now, you'd think...

For (J)RPGs, I wouldn't exactly look at FF as a shining example of amazing gameplay, especially not 13. The nicest thing I've heard about the 13 trilogy from someone was 'Lightning Returns is an interesting twist in gameplay hidden under an obviously-tiny budget for a FF title and really should have been made in a proper engine, not Crystal Tools.' I'd rather look towards Radiant Historia or SMT/Persona for that.

As far as KS goes, so far I've backed 10 games. Out of those, I've gotten at least a playable game out of 7 of those (plus AI War 2, once it makes its way into EA), one died, and one has vanished into the mists of the internet incomplete. Probably the only one with an absurd funding point reached would be planetary annihilation. Might be luck or just me choosing things that really sounded worthwhile, but I'd call that a pretty good payout in the end.